Blog

Building your own travel sized virtual lab with ESXi and the Intel SkullCanyon NUC

Hello Reader, It’s been awhile and I know that, sorry for not writing sooner but to quote Ferris Bueller

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

So while I’ve worked on a variety of cases, projects and new artifacts to share I’ve neglected the blog. For those of you who have been watching/listening you know I’ve kept up the Forensic Lunch videocast/podcast but to be fair the Blog is my first child and I’ve left it idle for too long.

You would have seen me talk about building my own portable cloud for lab testing and research. People seem to have received this very well and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed using it! So to that end I thought I would detail out how I set this up in case you wanted to do the same.

Step 2. Using chrome, not sure why I had some errors in firefox but I did, go to this page to register for the free version of ESXi. (Note this is the free version of ESXi that will generate a license key for life, the other version will expire after 60 days )https://my.vmware.com/en/group/vmware/evalcenter?p=free-esxi6

Step 3. Make a note of your license key as seen in the picture below, you’ll want to copy and paste this and keep it as it won’t show up as a license key associated with your MyVmware account

Step 4. Click to download the product named “ESXi ISO image (Includes VMware Tools)”. You could also download the vsphere client at this point or you can grab it from a link emebdded within the ESXI homepage when you get it installed.

Step 5. After downloading the ISO you will need to put it onto some form of bootable media for it to install onto your Intel Skull Canyon NUC as it has no optical drive of its own. I choose to do this to a USB thumb drive. To do turn the ISO into a successfully booting USB drive I used rufus and you can to.

Step 5a. Download Rufus: https://rufus.akeo.ie/downloads/rufus-2.11.exeStep 5b. Execute RufusStep 5c. Configure Rufus to look something like what I have below. Where Device is the USB thumb drive you have plugged in and under ISO image I’ve selected the ESXi iso file I downloaded and click start.

Step 6. With your ESXi media now on a bootable USB drive you are ready to move on to the Intel Skull Canyon NUC itself. Start by actually getting one! I got mine at Fry’s Electronics, Microcenter also carries them and they both price match Amazon now. If you wanted to get it online I would recommend Amazon to do so and you can support a good charity while doing so by using smile.amazon.com. I support the Girl Scouts of Northeast Texas with my purchases.

You can use other storage and RAM of course, I used these because I wanted the speed of NVMe M.2 (2GB/sec reads and 1.5GB/sec writes) with all the memory I could get to feed the VMs that will be running on the NUC.

Step 7. Put the storage and RAM into the NUC, plug it in to the wall, attach a USB keyboard and mouse, attach a monitor and boot up to the Intel Visual Bios. You will need to disable the Thunderbolt controller on the NUC before installing ESXi, you can re-enable it after you are done installing ESXi.